Monday, May 13, 2013

Mechanically dis-inclined

One consequence of organizing the end-of-semester vehicle safety check activity (see recent posts) has been that I re-acquaint myself regularly with the state of mechanical knowledge among Today's Youth.

Which is, to say the least, not very good.

As a former RAF engineer and scion of the great engineering city of Sheffield, England, this to me is as great a harbinger of the end of civilization as 400ppm. In fact, I'm happy to connect the two for you, if you ever want to listen to a two-hour rant.

The Cliff Notes: We're heading for hell in a hand-basket because we are too lazy to learn about complicated unpleasant things.

A similar level of mechanical disadvantage nearly cost the young lady in this NYT article $3,000 for a couple of ten-dollar radiator hoses and a set of struts that I can get delivered to my home for $49.95 off the Internet in two business days.

But at least she began to learn enough from the experience to avoid such things. Read it and weep.

Environmental Scenarios and Solutions

What is this all about?

This web log or "blog" contains selected product from the ongoing, formal and informal, intellectual and practical exploration of the problem of human ecological sustainability that my students at Unity College and I are engaged in, reported on a weekly and even daily and hourly basis.

Posts come primarily from me, Dr. Michael W. "Mick" Womersley, Professor of Human Ecology and lead faculty in the Sustainable Energy Management degree program at Unity College, but also from students, and collaborators around the world.

We have some Big Questions to try to answer.

As the 21st century enters its second decade, human population growth, and growth in the physical scale of the human economic endeavor on planet Earth continue apace. There are four primary questions that result: 1) How long can this growth continue before vital ecological life-support systems are damaged beyond repair? 2) How might that repair begin? 3) How can we trammel growth without also trammeling democracy and human freedom? 4) What are the institutions of a free and sustainable human world, and 5) what is the training required to participate?

If you'd like these questions answered, or, at least, if you'd like to follow us as we try to answer them, you can watch our daily progress in the main blog section to the left, or begin by reading one of the posts below.Mick Womersley's (somewhat) academic thought:A link to a blog post organizing some of the more original thinking on this blog.The Womerlippi FarmThe small farm kept by myself and my partner Aimee